The Association between Intimate Partner Violence and Birth Spacing: An Application of the Cox Proportional Hazards Model to the Demographic and Health Surveys

Lauren Maxwell, McGill University

Intimate partner violence (IPV) against women is a global problem. Understanding how IPV modifies women’s reproductive outcomes is important to quantifying the burden of this social epidemic. Male control of their female partner’s fertility is one important pathway for IPV. Fertility control may take the form of contraceptive sabotage, forced unprotected sex or other threatening behaviors. (1) Birth spacing is an important predictor of both maternal and infant mortality. This analysis will examine the association between women’s experience of physical and sexual IPV and birth spacing. This analysis will use data from all Demographic and Health Survey versions V and VI that included the Domestic Violence module, including 35 countries from the five DHS regions. We will use the cox proportional hazards model to Results from the correlated hazard model to compare intervals between births for women who do and do not experience IPV prior to the index pregnancy.